Before accessing a network, a terminal needs to receive initial information sent by a base station, where the initial information includes system information. The system information includes: a master information block (MIB), a system information block (SIB), and the like, where the MIB is carried over a physical broadcast channel (PBCH). The system information is information necessary for the terminal to communicate with the base station before the terminal accesses the network. For ease of description, unless specially stated, the system information mentioned in solutions of the present invention may include a master information block or a system information block, or include both a master information block and a system information block.
In a coverage enhancement scenario, to enable the terminal to receive the system information sent by the base station, the base station repeatedly sends the system information to the terminal, and the terminal performs joint receiving, so as to meet a requirement that the terminal may correctly receive the system information.
The prior art has the following disadvantage: to ensure that terminals of different receiving capabilities can correctly receive the system information, even if coverage enhancement capabilities or requirements requested by different cells are different, the base station uses a widest scope of resources to send the system information to the terminals, and the terminals receive the system information by using the widest scope of resources. Actually, not all the terminals have a lowest receiving capability, and therefore such a processing manner in the prior art causes a low resource utilization rate.